Christopher Monckton, the third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley and the science adviser to the most famous British PM of the last 50 years, is quite an amazing character. He is one of the aristocratic treasures of the British empire. He is known to his wider family as "Mr Knowledge". More importantly, many fans of puzzles know him because of his Eternity puzzle from 1999. The first solver of the new Eternity II puzzle that was released in July 2007, will receive 2 million dollars, more than ever before.
He has also decided to dedicate a lot of time to a widely discussed "scientific problem" and to look at the evidence behind the popular theory of the so-called "global warming" a bit more carefully. The results of his work were reported in The Telegraph:
- The Sun is warmer now... (11/5/2006) - originally called "Climate chaos? Don't believe it"
- Apocalypse cancelled (40-page-long PDF supplement of the above article)
- Wrong problem, wrong solution (11/12/2006)
- Responses of the readers (77-page-long PDF file with positive responses of the readers to the first article; you will find "It isn't even wrong" there, too)
- Gore Gored (29-page-long reply to Al Gore)
- Monckton to Rockefeller and Snowe, U.S. senators (full)
- Lord Monckton's reply to IPCC
- Lord Monckton invites Al Gore for an international debate
- Monckton: the fingerprint is absent (wrong altitude/latitude dependence)
- 35 errors in Gore's movie
- A seminar by Monckton (video)
- 23 Trenberth's errors
- Climate sensitivity reconsidered (July 2008, discussion at the American Physical Society; now includes a red disclaimer by an Inquisition-like "council" that undermines the work of the APS from within)
However, one half of these hypotheses are almost certainly untrue, one third of them is very unlikely, and the rest is unproven. The "global warming paradigm" is supported by downright false statements about the scientific opinions of the actual scientists; unjustified negligence of the natural variability in comparison with the recent trends; negligence of the influence of solar dynamics, cosmic rays, and other effects; unrealistic estimates about the influence of higher temperatures on life and humanity and the sign of this effect; overestimates of the capability of the recently proposed regulating mechanisms to change the overall climate dynamics; wrong calculations of the costs and benefits; unjustifiable application of the so-called precautionary principle.
In other words, the whole framework known as "global warming" is not holding too much water.
Monckton's article "Apocalypse cancelled" is filled with a lot of graphs - current temperature graphs, temperature reconstructions, calculations of the sensitivity etc. - references, and analyses of the scientific work. Some minor errors probably occured in his text and some of them were pointed out by the readers: for example, Lord Monckton chose the units of "Watts per squared meter and second" for the flux. ;-) Nevertheless, they can hardly change anything about Monckton's qualitative conclusions: it is incredibly unlikely that the whole ideology behind the recently proposed international policies can be supported by a comprehensive rational or even scientific justification. And incidentally, the dominant motivation behind these policies is probably the dream of certain people to create a world government.
Most people whom I consider to be respectable mainstream climate scientists - Richard Lindzen, Hans von Storch, and several others - would probably think that Monckton has offered a legitimate viewpoint on this whole set of issues that can be viewed as an informed outsider's unusually qualified zeroth approximation how to think about the climate and its interactions with the mankind.
But there exists a certain rather aggressive class of people who find Monckton's analysis to be a very inconvenient truth, if I can use the words of one of them, much like any other analysis whose conclusions are just a little bit similar. The heretics who carry these "dangerous" opinions must be attacked, destroyed, silenced, and removed. Their comments at all blogs controlled by the nice, progressive believers in the global warming must be erased because the Earth, if not the Universe or even the multiverse, is at stake. Needless to say, this also applies to all of my comments at Cosmic Variance.
If you open news.google.com, you will find about 16,800 articles with the keyword "global warming" that were published during the last 30 days or so in sufficiently important media. That's more than 1000 times more than the number of silly articles attacking string theory - and even the number of silly recent articles attacking string theory was higher by more than one order of magnitude than what it should have been. ;-) Several months ago, the number of the "global warming" hits was below 10,000. (Yes, a fraction of this increase is due to a larger ensemble of the sources included in the search engine.) The hysteria is clearly getting more and more serious.
This hysteria occurs at the same time when the climate is cooling from 2005, the number of Atlantic hurricanes has dropped by 70 percent from the previous year, and most of the evidence for an "exceptional global warming" such as the "hockey stick graph" is being debunked by the scientific panel of the National Academy of Sciences, another panel ordered by the U.S. lawmakers, and by other scientists.
This hysteria clearly doesn't depend on science in any substantial way. If you look at these 16,800 articles, most of them are nothing else than pure crap. They offer ever crazier catastrophic predictions and ever more insane ideas how to fight with the alleged "problem" to ever less educated and ever more manipulable readers who are exerting ever more irrational pressure on the politicians. The articles blame ever more unrelated events on the global warming. The current standard is that every person who dies under the sunny skies was killed by the global warming; however, the newspapers are always very careful not to mention the climate when they write about the 25,000 Britons who froze in 2005, among dozens of similar examples.
The ecoactivists are suing the U.S. president (30 minutes ago). Various politicians want to create new committees and policies to feel even more important and attractive for the environmentalist activists than they have ever been and other politicians are doing the same thing because they are just scared by these loud and obnoxious ecoterrorists and their semi-serious allies who have literally flooded the universities, companies, and newspapers.
Both second class as well as third class scientists are presenting their irrational views on the climate that have nothing to do with their actual research. It is described how it is important to exterminate or at least eliminate all the "skeptics" who are surely being uniformly paid by the evil oil corporations. The skeptics are painted as a fringe negligible minority; nevertheless they seem capable to halt the whole international movement to fight against the "climate change".
These articles are being written by thousands of journalists who are either intellectually challenged so that they can't figure out that what they write makes no sense, or they are heavily influenced by their personal interest to be interesting, important, and to produce a lot of fictitious "stories" because these "stories" are sold well - especially to the least demanding readers. These stories are also easy to write down and it doesn't matter whether they're completely unsubstantiated because thousands of other, similarly corrupt journalists are writing the very same things so there is never any reason to be worried or to feel guilty: the group-think also acts as a nearly perfect group-shield. In many cases, the journalists suffer of both of the problems mentioned above and several more.
read more @ The Reference Frame
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